Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday February 04, 2010 @07:59AM
from the give-me-the-numbers dept.

MojoKid writes "With the International Solid-State Circuits Conference less than a week away, Intel has released additional details on its upcoming hexa-core desktop CPU, next gen mobile, and dual-core Westmere processors. Much of the dual-core data was revealed last month when Intel unveiled their Clarkdale architecture. However, when Intel set its internal goals for what its calling Westmere 6C, the company aimed to boost both core and cache count by 50 percent without increasing the processor's thermal envelope. Westmere 6C (codename Gulftown) is a native six-core chip. Intel has crammed 1.17 billion transistors into a die that's approximately 240mm sq. The new chip carries 12MB up L3 (up from Nehalem's 8MB) and a TDP of 130W at 3.33GHz. In addition, Intel has built in AES encryption instruction decode support as well as a number of improvements to Gulftown's power consumption, especially in idle sleep states."

Be realistic. Multitasking for the vast majority of your regular user's needs were handled just fine by a single cpu and a pre-emptive multitasking system.

Having a second core was handy for people who like to play world of warcraft in one window and surf web pages in the other (considering how much CPU modern web pages eat for some reason. yay flash?).

Having two more cores beyond that is fairly useless for the vast majority of even power users except for very specific apps that even they are running a very small percentage of the overall time they are using their computers.

If you are routinely running apps that take advantage of all 4 cores in current cpus, such as video encoding or the like, chances are what you really need isn't another 2 cores in your cpu, but a version of your encoder compiled to use CODA or the like on your 192-core GPU.

Maybe GTA 4 is a very specific app for you.To me, GTA 4 is an important application:)
And that game, my friend, requires a quad-core CPU. Which I don't have at the moment, and even with my Intel E6550 overclocked from 2.66 to 3.6 GHz the game runs at 25-35 FPS at 1680x1050, with both cores at 100%.
I used to have the same approach (multicore is dumb) but now it's a thing of the past.
There are more and more apps and games out there who take advantage of multicore, not to mention that operating systems (such as Windows 7) are better at allocationg sepaarte cores for single-core applications to balance the load.
Therefore, while I don't dismiss the need of having a multicore CPU, in the end it's all about balancing your investment against the benefits. If you need a 6-core CPU and it doesn't cost a kidney and a lung, then get it. Regardless of your decision as a customer, there's always a good thing in this sort of advancements: new stuff pushes down prices for older stuff:)

The move to multiple cores was driven primarily by Moore's law approaching fundamental physical realities in trying to further shrink conventional CMOS transistors. I'm sure manufacturers would have loved to stay with single cores and bump up clock speed every financial quarter rather than upset the industry's technological architecture.

LMAO. My videocard alone has more ram than my xbox 360 and PS3 combined. Maybe we will start comparing F-22's and messerschmitts soon. Perhaps we can look at how the Ferrari California stacks up to the new Honda Fit.